Cockfighting
craze takes wing: The
Philippine national betting pastime is going international

By Claro Cortez
Associated Press

MANILA -- As if partners in a ritualized slow dance,
each rooster lowers a wing and circles nearer the other, neck feathers
flaring. Suddenly, one attacks and the other leaps to meet the
challenge. They exchange kicks in midair, slashing with 4-inch-long,
razor-sharp steel blades attached to the back of their left legs. In a
few seconds it's over. One bird lies lifeless; the other struggles, maimed on
the dirt floor of the pit. Hundreds of roaring spectators settle their bets.

To
many foreigners, Philippine cockfighting is shockingly brutal -- far more
bloody than cockfights in other countries, where the birds battle with
sharpened natural leg spurs or ice pick-like steel gaffs attached to their
legs. Filipino roosters fight only one or two matches because of injuries or
death. Despite this twist, the Filipino national betting pastime is
becoming internationalized.

American breeders now supply most of the best fighting
roosters, and about 30 American cockfighters regularly fight their birds in
the Philippines. Canadians, Japanese and Taiwanese also occasionally
compete, although so far with less success. In January an American,
Carol NeSmith of Fulton, Miss., teamed up with two Filipino breeders to best
65 other entries in the Philippines' leading cockfighting competition, the
"World Slasher Derby."

"We feel very lucky to have won," said
NeSmith, who has been competing in the Philippines on and off for eight years.
"The competition here is so tough."

Many countries outlaw cockfighting, but the allure of
the gambling results in illegal bouts being staged around the world, often in
rural areas. Cockfighting is legal in the Philippines, Mexico and parts
or all of five U.S. states - Arizona, Louisiana, Missouri, New Mexico and
Oklahoma. Matches also can be found in Ireland, Colombia, Haiti, the Dominican
Republic, Cuba, Jamaica and Puerto Rico.

While competition is fierce inside the arena, the
arrival of foreign bird breeders has ruffled very few feathers among Filipino
aficionados. They share cockfighting secrets and even space in their farms for
foreigners to raise birds for local tournaments. "You have to fight
the best to be the very best," said Jun Santiago, the defending
Philippine cockfighter of the year and husband of Sen. Miriam
Defensor-Santiago, who narrowly lost the 1992 presidential election. "We
welcome all comers."

Some of the foreigners are drawn by the thrill of a
blood sport not practiced in their home countries. Ryoichi Saito, a
businessman from Tokyo, came to the Philippines six years ago for a business
meeting and was taken to a tournament by his hosts. Since then he has bought
600 roosters in the United States and has returned each year to fight his own
birds, which he raises on a farm outside Manila.

For others, the attraction is simply money.
Estimates of the number of roosters fought - and killed - each year in the
Philippines range from 7 million to 13 million, making the country a bird
seller's dream market. Although poor Filipinos use cheaper native birds,
imported "trios" - a rooster and two hens for breeding - usually go
for $1,300. A prize rooster can be worth up to $2,500.

The best way for foreign bird breeders to build a
reputation is to win local competitions. For them the prize is not the awards,
which are generally small, but steady future orders from Filipino
cockfighters. Fighting cocks are bred for aggressiveness and live a
privileged childhood. Instead of ordinary chicken mash, they are fed grains,
ground meat, fresh vegetables and milk, often with vitamin supplements.

Rich enthusiasts hire full-time veterinarians, farmhands
and trainers to exercise their birds and build their muscles. Among the
sport's many well-known participants are former House Speaker Ramon Mitra,
House Majority Leader Rodolfo Albano, the brother of former President Corazon
Aquino and many governors and mayors.

Isle
cockfighting persists despite laws against it

By Jean Christensen - Honolulu
Star-Bulletin

Cockfighting in Hawaii, depending on whom you ask, is: a
thriving underworld activity or a rich cultural practice threatened with
extinction.

The sport and gambling associated with it remain illegal
in the state despite its popularity, dating to early plantation days and, some
experts say, ancient Hawaii.

Alton
DeGama sees similarities between the missionaries who forced the activity
underground a century ago and today's "powers that be" who insist on
keeping it illegal. The Maui firefighter has been a cockfighting enthusiast
since he was introduced to the sport while growing up on the sugar cane town
of Puukoli.

"We are a dying people in the sense of what we
do," he said.

"I tell all the young guys, 'I hope you understand
you are the new generation.' When it's gone, it's too late."

DeGama served five days in jail in 1989 after he was
arrested at a cockfight and convicted of animal cruelty. In the years since,
he has written letters to lawmakers urging them to allow the sport, just as
they do high-stakes jackpot fishing tournaments and hole-in-one competitions
in golf.

"When I bring up golf, all the politicians
shake," he said. "They say, 'Don't mention golf.' The small man, the
poor man, he cannot go golf."

But to state Sen. Suzanne Chun Oakland (D, Palama-Alewa
Heights), the entertainment comes at too great an expense for the animals. She
introduced legislation this year that would have outlawed the sale,
manufacture and possession of gaffs, the razor like blades attached to the
roosters' legs that make the till-death battles quick and bloody. The bill
died in committee.

"They're putting unnatural things onto the chicken
and having them fight with that," she said. "I know there are ethnic
values there that in some way we need to be sensitive to, but also, just any
kind of situation that involves the pitting of animals against one another for
recreational purposes has not settled well with me." Police on Oahu
and the neighbor islands say they'll keep cracking down on the fights, which
sometimes draw hundreds to secret rural locations.

A raid in a remote area of South Kohala on the Big
Island last month netted five arrests. The fight was attended by more than 200
people from throughout the island, said Capt. Morton Carter, commander of the
Criminal Investigations Division. "It's no longer a friendly little
gathering when you have that kind of activity," Carter said. Organized
crime clearly has a hand in some of the events, he said.

Sgt. Alan Matsumura of the Honolulu Police Department's
gambling detail said police made 23 cockfighting arrests in February and 14 in
January. The numbers have stayed relatively steady over the years, he
said. Police monitor known cockfighting sites in Waipahu, Ewa, Ewa
Beach, Waianae, Waimanalo, Kahaluu, Aiea and Kalihi, and rely on tips from the
public, he said.

In Enclaves of Rural America, a Cockfighting Industry Thrives

By PETER T. KILBORN

Michael Wyke for The New York Times

ELLYVILLE, Okla., June 5 -- In urban America the blood sport of
cockfighting survives only furtively, in seedy pits like one that the
police raided in the Bronx on Saturday night. But the game remains far more entrenched in many rural communities like
this one, where in a carnival atmosphere on Friday night 200 people
gathered at the local cockfighting club to watch roosters tear each other
apart and to bet on their fates.

Cockfighting classes, instructional videos and books, newsletters and
magazines help fuel a subculture and enterprises across the country.
More than half the 170 pages of the May issue of Gamecock, a 62-year-old
monthly magazine that claims 16,000 subscribers, are advertisements
intended for cockfighters. Breeders from Connecticut to California offer
proven winners for $1,000, untested cocks for $75 to $300, and a dozen
eggs of winners' mother hens for $100 to $200. The magazines also run advertisements for drugs. A drug labeled Strychly
Speed is the stimulant strychine, which the ad says "speeds up the
bird's reflexes, making him quick on the draw." Another, called Pure
Aggression, can "put an end to the fear of shock in those long, hard
fights."

Through the advertisements and feed stores, a score of manufacturers sell
gaffs and a wide variety of curved, razor-sharp knives, up to three inches
long, for mounting on legs. The knives, costing up to $100, tend to kill
faster than the cheaper, ice pick-like gaffs, because they rip as well as
pierce. Cockfighters maintain that the weapons simply deal a quick death
to birds that would die in much longer bouts were they to use their
natural spurs.

Cockfighting endures legally in New Mexico, Louisiana and Oklahoma, which
is home to more than 40 established back-road pits, and illegally in many
other states. While betting is a misdemeanor, it is routine at the pits
and ignored by most county sheriffs. All states allow breeding of the birds, which are then sold to states
where fighting is legal or to the Philippines, Guam, Mexico and other
countries where the sport is popular or, in states where it is outlawed,
are hustled out to the woods and urban back alleys for illicit lethal
combat.

From coast to coast, farm-supply companies sell trainloads of vitamin- and
nutrient-enriched feed for fighting cocks. In the last few years, though, cockfighting has become a target of animal
protection advocates, who call it barbaric and unambiguously cruel, the
only sport since the states banned dog fighting decades ago in which
animals are bred solely to kill one another. Two years ago the Humane Society of the United States helped opponents of
cockfighting in Arizona and Missouri win ballot initiatives that outlawed
it.

Early this year the Oklahoma Coalition Against Cockfighting, largely with
$100,000 in financing from the society, gathered more than 100,000
signatures for a referendum on a proposal to ban the fights and punish
violators with fines of up to $25,000 and jail terms of up to 10 years.
And on Capitol Hill, more than 180 House members and more than 40 senators
are sponsoring bills to prohibit the interstate shipment of fighting
cocks.

But for now, anyway, the bouts continue. Here in Kellyville, some 30 miles
southwest of Tulsa, only a sign showing the small silhouette of a rooster
marks the turn off Route 66 up a dirt road to the corrugated metal home of
the Kellyville Game Club. In the club's glass-enclosed pit, two men step
onto the dirt floor from opposite corners. Each cradles under one arm a fidgeting 2-year-old rooster with alert
orange eyes.

These are strikingly majestic birds, one of the Hatch breed, the other a
Roundhead, with shimmering manes of orange hackle feathers and arching
black tail feathers. But their heads, shorn of wattles and haughty combs,
have become bobbing red knobs. Bound like a thorn to the nub of each of
their severed spurs is a curved, two-inch-long steel gaff that can
puncture heart, brain or lungs with the thrust of a heel. The birds are two of the 156, paired by weapons and weight, that will
fight at the regular Friday night derby starting at 10 o'clock.

Admission, restricted to members of the breeders' association and their
families, costs $11. The 39 men who have each entered the required number
of four birds pay participation fees of up to $75. The fees go into the
purse, which is sometimes as much as $5,000, that will go to the owners of
the four winning birds.

In the pit now, the two men -- one in a red baseball cap, the other
wearing a gray T-shirt -- begin the precombat ritual of thrusting their
birds back and forth, beak to beak. The betting starts. "Ten on the
red hat," shouts one of 200 viewers in the six tiers of seats
surrounding the pit. "Twenty on the gray shirt," shouts another.
The referee shouts, "Ready, pit!" The birds explode from their
handlers' grasps and collide breast to breast, a foot off the ground. Beak
grabbing beak, hackles flaring like porcupine quills, they bounce apart
and then collide, again and again.

The Hatch takes command. The Roundhead rolls over, then revives. He pounds
the Hatch with a foot, spearing a lung. The Hatch fades, hunkering down
and refusing to budge. As he coughs up drops of blood, his breathing
sounds like footsteps on gravel. The Roundhead, fatigued but intact, wins.
The Hatch is carried off, most likely to die.

No one knows the full dimensions of this business. Sandy C. Johnson, an
Ohio breeder who is director of administration for the United Game fowl
Breeders Association, with affiliates in 33 states, declined to disclose
any specific figures but said cockfighting generated hundreds of millions
of dollars a year in sales of birds, medicines, feed, and breeding and
fighting gear. Alabama, Ms. Johnson said, is probably the biggest producer, just ahead of
Texas. "We estimate that Alabama has 11,545 farms" that raise fighting
cocks, she said.

And Mark Urbanowsky, president of Blue Bonnet Feeds in Ardmore, Okla.,
said he and his competitors sold fighting-cock feed worth $25 million to
$30 million a year to stores in Oklahoma alone.

Among the industry's customers is Jeffrey Pearce, who has a fighting-cock
farm on the outskirts of Sallisaw, Okla. Mr. Pearce moved to Oklahoma
eight years ago from Oregon, where he and his father were breeders; his
father-in-law is a prominent breeder in Texas. Mr. Pearce raises Hatches, known for power, and Blacks, known for speed,
and also crosses them. He has all but sold out this year's production of
200 2-year-olds, for $150 to $175 each, largely to the Philippines and
Guam.

Starting at puberty, at 6 to 8 months old, Mr. Pearce said, each male bird
(called a stag until its first molt, at the age of 2 years) is dispatched
to its own two-sided, four-foot-tall metal A-frame hut. There it is
tethered by a nine-foot cord, to keep it off the turf of neighboring males
and so prevent injury from fighting. Across Mr. Pearce's closely groomed field of huts, 200 stags strutted and
crowed the other day, pecking at the grass and their feed.

Unlike inexpert breeders, Mr. Pearce said, he does not drug the birds to
instill greater aggressiveness. Rather, he said, good care produces the
toughest, healthiest fighters. "We don't make them fight," he said. "Their sole purpose in
life is to fight."

Larry Oliver, lawyer for the 7,000-member Oklahoma Game fowl Breeders
Association, said of the birds, "They just don't like each
other." George R. Day, who raises 100 cocks on a 250-acre property
near Mr. Pearce's, said the opponents of cockfighting did not understand
the sport's meaning in many rural areas.

"You have people who have never lived a rural lifestyle trying to
impress their values on us," Mr. Day said. "It doesn't mean
they're right. It just means there are more of them."

To the Humane Society and the state's anti-cockfighting coalition, the
sport is beyond justification, unlike killing for food. "We have this
as a top priority," Wayne Pacelle, senior vice president of the
society, said of opposition to the sport.

With their game and their livelihood under attack, members of the Oklahoma
breeders' association are engaged in legal challenges against the
coalition's referendum, trying to stall it for at least a year beyond this
November and gain enough time to kill it through lobbying. The coalition could succeed: opposition to cockfighting has become
politically dicey. Cockfighters contribute to political campaigns, and,
like most Oklahoma officeholders, Gov. Frank Keating, a Republican, has
been staying out of the dispute.

"He really has not taken a position," said John Cox, a spokesman
for Mr. Keating. "I don't think he sees a lot of merit in cockfighting, but there are
a lot of business interests in the state that have to be adhered to a
little bit."

Blood sport with chance to win big money attracts many in Philippines

February
4, 2000
Web posted at: 11:33 a.m. HKT (0333 GMT)

MANILA,
Philippines -- Since cockfighting was first introduced in the 16th century
by Spanish colonizers, it has become one of the most popular spectator sports in
the Philippines.

And with the possibility of thousands of dollars changing hands during each
fight, it's hard to tell which is the bigger attraction -- the thrill of combat
or lure of gambling.

Before each bout, a sharp 3-inch blade is attached to the gamecocks, which
are specially bred for ferocity and territorial instincts, making the fight even
more deadly. After all the bets are placed, the gamecocks enter the
pentagon-shaped arena where a referee awaits them. Each fight is usually over in
a matter of minutes.

Those who regularly take part say given the nature of the sport, it's very
much a male-only preserve. They also say cockfighting is the best vice one could
ever have.

"Other vices you suffer, but with this vice... you can actually win.
With other vices, you don't win at all. This vice is a sure win," says
Henry Centeno, a bookie. "Here you can bring home cash, unlike other vices
where you end up with nothing at all, like drugs, wine and women."

Cockfighting's popularity has gone from the legal cockpit arena out to the
streets where it's still considered illegal. But there are still restrictions
says lawmaker and gamecock breeder Ramon Revilla.

"Those who live far from the cockpit, they just gather in a corner of a
street somewhere to cockfight. But that's illegal and the police usually arrest
those who do this. But for me, they should not be arrested and should be left
alone, and be given their entertainment and to satisfy their love for the
sport," Revilla said.

Animal lovers have long been fighting to put a stop to the sport, saying it's
brutal and cruel. But sociologists say fans are drawn to it nonetheless.

"It's exciting to watch. Second, it's a form of... it's a gambling
activity. People get money out of it. And so, in many provinces, particularly if
there are no other jobs, one way to get money is through cockfighting,"
says local Professor of Sociology Dr. Ricardo Abad. "It's a game of chance,
and many Filipinos believe in chance, believe in luck, believe in getting money
just like that, believing in miracles, it's a romantic notion of life."